Short & Satisfying Book Club: "On the Clock" by Claire Baglin

One family: two stories of unappreciated hard work. French-fry oil burns patterns on a twenty-year-old writer's wrists; her father can never scrub his fingernails clean of grease. One story spans a summer; the other, a lifetime.

Told in two rapidly alternating strands, On The Clock packs a swift saga of a working-class girls life, moving from grimy campgrounds on hard-won family holidays to a crappy seasonal job, "mired in the heart of pointlessness" but likewise hard-won. If her father jokes about being awarded a medal for his decades working at the same factory, he is proud of it too. Claire Baglins's wry and crisply powerful depiction of their lives—at once affectionate and alienated—is particularly compelling. As Publishers Weekly notes, it is "a concise and arresting debut. In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints of portrait of her family's struggles with poverty. The simplicity of the prose only enhances the harrowing story. Readers will be stirred."

Claire Baglin was born in 1998 in Normandy, where her father labored in a factory and her mother was a social worker. On the Clock is her first book.

A professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jordan Stump has won the ALTA National Translation Award for Prose and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

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